About once a week, one of my neighbors calls out to me, “What’cha painting now?” It’s usually a good question, because I’m always up to something.

Last week, that something was tackling one of the last remaining builder’s beige walls in my home.

I didn’t have the painters paint this one Lindsay White because I had other plans for it. And those plans involved yellow paint.

As a HomeRight Brand Ambassador, I have the opportunity to test out their products. Before I got started on this little hallway, I went on their website in search for something that would make painting this area a lot easier.

I mean, I HATE that part of the wall. A mini-roller won’t really fit in there, so I have to paint the whole thing with a brush. Oh. My. Word. THE HUMANITY!

When I was searching for the most perfect white paint on Earth for my ceilings, I kept coming up short. Out of all of my fan decks, the colors were just not quite white enough. They were too yellow, too blue, too gray. It made me feel like the Goldilocks of white paint.

I knew that a lot of people bought white paint straight off the shelf. I considered going that route, too, until one of my favorite paint mixologists (I know that’s not a real thing, but I like calling them that) at Home Depot suggested that I add some colorant into the white base to bind the paint. Otherwise, it likely wouldn’t cover very well since it would be slightly transparent. So, we decided to add 1 ounce of white to the already white paint. Why? We just thought it sounded right. I mean white.

I’m sure several of you just about fell off your chairs when you saw that colors I was using – two shades of greige (grey/beige). “Lindsay choosing greige? Well, I never!”

Never fear! The wall I was striping was for a friend’s beautiful, gender neutral nursery. During my last post, I detailed how to use the new line of FrogTape® and finished the big stripes in the room – but we wanted to do an accent stripe, as well. You know I pretty much never take the simple design route.

As soon as it was time to start transforming my daughter’s nursery into a “big girl” room, I knew that I wanted an emerald green, four poster bed. Why? I have no idea – and this was long before emerald was the 2013 Pantone Color of the Year. Just like I had picked out the name Emma for my daughter nearly 30 years ago and it’s one of the most popular names in the US now. I guess I’m ahead of my time.

I didn’t want to spend a fortune on a bed that I’d end up painting, so I scoured Craigslist for months looking for the perfect candidate. It needed to be full sized. Its posts needed to be the same height on the headboard and the footboard. It needed to have a simple design. And it needed to be cheap.

I finally found one for $35 and I was so excited to bring it home. It needed much more work than I originally thought, but that’s a normal thing around here. A lot of blood, sweat and tears (and cussing, if I am being honest) went into this transformation, but in the end, I think I hit it out of the park.

The bed had an original oil-based factory finish on it (white), but an eager DIYer had painted black latex on top of it. Regular latex paint won’t bond to a shiny surface, so the black paint just scratched off. There was nothing I could do but scrape and sand the bed down to the original wood.

When I painted my kids’ shotgun bathroom, I used one of my favorite paint tools – a PaintStick. Using a tube inserted into your bucket of paint, you suck paint into the handle of the stick and then push the paint through the roller. By not needing to use messy paint trays or having to climb up and down a ladder to constantly load a roller with paint, it makes painting a breeze.

Well, it’s a breeze until you need to paint a small space. In the kids’ bathroom, the end of the PaintStick hit the wall behind me while I was trying to paint the wall in front of me. It was really irritating, and I ended up doing some sort of PaintStick yoga to be able to paint the bathroom. It was far less irritating than using a paint tray, but irritating nonetheless. I never wanted to have to invent my own PaintStick yoga poses!

Then, HomeRight (the company who makes the PaintStick) sent me a PaintStick Mini – a new product that they had just developed. Y’all, it’s the same thing as a regular PaintStick, but just in a Mini Me version. Why couldn’t this have been on the market when I was doing my PaintStick yoga in the bathroom?!?

Compared to the PaintStick, the PaintStick Mini worked just as easily. Its pole is shorter and its roller head is smaller, so that makes it easier to get into tight spaces and corners. You do have to reload it more often than the original PaintStick, but that’s the price you pay for a shorter extension pole.

I’m working on my big 2013 project (hey, I still have a month and a half until 2014), so I decided to give my PaintStick Mini a whirl in a small enclave I have by my staircase. In all honestly, I was waiting for a pork roast to be finished in the oven and decided that this wall couldn’t go on being beige for one second longer. Am I the only one to decide things like that?

So, in 30 minutes I was able to cut in with a paint brush and roll this section (and a little more not pictured). The next day, I applied the second coat in the same time frame. In an hour total, I transformed this space from a blah blah beige enclave to something that feels exciting and new to me – and so much more modern than the builder’s beige.

Now I have two favorite paint tools in my holster – the PaintStick and the PaintStick Mini.

Disclosure: I have been compensated for this post by Homeright. All opinions – and PaintStick yoga poses – are my own.

Several months ago, I was minding my own business in the painting section at Lowe’s when I almost ran into something in the middle of the aisle. It was one of those cardboard displays that they have every so often featuring an item that they were promoting. I generally ignore those displays since I know what I’m looking for when I go in there, but this one stopped me because it was bright orange.

And because it was for a new type of painters tape kit from FrogTape…made specifically for textured surfaces.

Cue the heavens opening and the angels singing.

As someone who is obsessed with sharp, graphic patterns on my walls, having an entire house of knock down textured walls is the bane of my existence. I think knock down texture is largely a regional thing, so many of you probably don’t experience this. But, painters tape doesn’t properly seal on textured walls due to the raised texture, so the paint bleeds under the tape. In fact, I’ve had to develop my own time consuming system for working with regular painters tape on textured walls. And in all honesty, I don’t normally use FrogTape – neither the green nor the yellow versions. I have always thought that the 3M blue tape worked well (and am actually in love with this Bloc-it tape* that you can only get off of Amazon).

But, they had me at “textured surface, ” so I immediately bought one of the new orange kits. At $14 it wasn’t something cheap to try on a whim, but if it saved me hours of my time the next time I needed to stripe a wall, it was well worth it.

Fast forward to this weekend when I was striping a wall for a friend. She has textured walls, too, and I gave this new paint kit a shot.